Can everyone live a ‘good life’ without destroying the planet?Tue, 14 Jul 2026 15:00:03 +0000 Cutting back on our use of energy and materials so that we live within Earth’s means can seem like an insurmountable challenge. But after a decade grappling with these problems, a historic Portuguese city is beginning to walk this tightrope | |
Hard but lightweight ‘bio-metal’ material discovered in sea worm jawsTue, 14 Jul 2026 15:00:00 +0000 Marine bristle worms have jaws made from a mix of proteins and metal ions that may constitute a whole new kind of material, with possible applications in engineering | |
Why praying for rain appears to work – but only in some placesTue, 14 Jul 2026 14:00:00 +0000 In some parts of the world, the probability of rain rises with every day it doesn’t rain, and communities in these places are more likely to carry out rain-making rituals | |
The US-China AI arms race has taken an unexpected turnTue, 14 Jul 2026 11:00:00 +0000 Powerful artificial intelligence models built by Chinese companies have gone from inducing widespread panic to being met with a shrug of the shoulders – what changed? | |
Do we owe our existence to weird ‘virtual’ particles?Tue, 14 Jul 2026 10:00:00 +0000 When considering what makes up a human body, a physicist drills down beyond the atomic level. Columnist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein explores the not-exactly-real particles that allow the stuff we’re made of to hang together | |
Maya mathematician’s name decoded alongside astronomical formulaMon, 13 Jul 2026 23:01:00 +0000 Hieroglyphs on the wall of a Maya building record calculations concerning the orbits of Earth, Mars and Venus, as well as the name of a mathematician who wrote the text around 1200 years ago | |
How humans evolved to be twice as big as our ancestorsMon, 13 Jul 2026 17:00:03 +0000 Artistic representations of ancient humans often show large men with bulging muscles – but our ancestors were actually smaller than us, in both height and body mass. Columnist Michael Marshall reveals surprising details about the short kings of prehistory | |
Sugar molecules found in interstellar space for the first timeMon, 13 Jul 2026 15:00:54 +0000 Researchers have long suspected early life may have been helped by sugars brought to Earth by asteroids – now a sugar found in raspberries has been spotted in a cosmic cloud nearly 27 light years away | |
Alzheimer’s, stroke, depression: The preventative power of saunaMon, 13 Jul 2026 15:00:21 +0000 Sustained heat stress is bad for our health and can be deadly. But we’re discovering that heat therapies like sauna, when used in the right way, have surprisingly wide-reaching benefits for health | |
Shifts in the jet stream are behind Europe’s long heatwavesMon, 13 Jul 2026 13:00:09 +0000 Two types of jet stream patterns seem to be causing persistent heat domes over Europe, with big questions for the future | |